RePEc documentation: Monitoring HoPEc

First of all, get on he forward list of hopec@netec.wustl.edu

Main task is weed out false claims of authorship. Those are 
usually quite easy to spot. You get by email every new or 
modified template, thus if someone with a hotmail address
claims to have published something, verify on HoPEc whether
author names correspond. The monthly complete refresh of HoPEc
also generates a list of "odd name correspondences". This list
can be found on netec.mcc.ac.uk, account adnetec, at
/home/adnetec/Ivan/gemini-pub/unmatched-authorship-claims-list

Frauders ought to be deleted. To do so, remove their template
in /home/adnetec/RePEc/per/pers/. Remove also bozos registering
with funny names. Twice a year, I also email those who did not claim 
any papers. Among those, many have now invalid email addresses. 
They are also removed.

Next task is doing a little quality control for the legit people.
Check whether new registrants who claimed no papers but ought to have 
some did a poor job. If so, just add one paper that is obviously 
theirs so that they start getting the monthly emails. Do this to their
template in /home/adnetec/RePEc/per/pers/. Also add any obvious 
affiliation.

Finally, keep track of first time registrants with claimed items who 
fail to confirm from their email. The bottom of the email reveals if
they have claimed items (RA0WA0: no research association, no work
association, RA17WA2 17 and 2). Send them a gentle reminder after a 
day.

Note that anybody loging into HoPEc is tracked, including his IP 
address. Log files are at /home/adnetec/HoPEc/pers-logs/. They are
quite useful to help answer questions about the service. 

Finally, until we have a Last-Modified: field in person templates,
modifying things in the templates is a bit tricky. Monthly mailings
use the last modified date to customize reminders. Thus you do not 
want to modify templates directly. To do this, several tools are 
available in /home/adnetec/RePEc/per/pers/. They all increment the  
modification times just a little so as to get the templates mirrored:
hopecchange.pl allows to delete, add or change one specific line in a 
               specific template
hopecmodify.pl to do some bulk changes
hopecadd.pl    to do some bulk additions
hopecremove.pl to do some bulk removals

Author: Christian Zimmermann, 2002-05-19